Two years ago, every person of a working team were processing a bunch of txt files by hand, using excel, against the time (data that would be published at the website). As the deadline was really close, they asked for more monkeys from the rest of the people in the building.

Instead of doing that in excel, I wrote a small script with some flipflops and regexprs in some minutes and processed my assigned files. Then run over the rest of the files assigned to my team, and finally, run against the whole folder, just to check that the script was OK (and found some errors in files manually generated by others).

The same requirement would be processed again last year, so they asked for my script. Some days later, I was told that it run without problems, giving the results just in a pair of seconds!!!